Could Be the Fans, Man

Pardon me for being brash, but it’s certainly no secret that the group mind of the Phillies faithful is about as unruly as the world markets are on this fine Friday afternoon. And while I’ve never been to Citizens Bank Ballpark, I have seen the drunken exploits of Phillies fanatics in St. Louis as well as here in Chicago. In fact, one of my fondest baseball memories is seeing two Phillies fans fight two Cubs fans outside of Haray Caray’s Tavern on Sheffield and Addison. Quite the conundrum as I didn’t know who to root for: the two ^ssholes in Cubs jerseys or the two ^ssholes in Phillies jerseys.

I don’t remember who won the fight; I do remember I wanted to stay as far away from them as possible.

And that hasn’t changed one bit.

So in reading Mike Bauman’s column this morning — where he theorizes that in order for the Dodgers to come out of Philly with a win someone other than Manny Ramirez has got to hit the ball — I chuckled when he passively mentioned the x-factor of drowning out the noise of “the extremely vocal support of 45,839 of their [the Phillies’] closest friends.”

I will remain silent on this. While I haven’t seen anything quite like that at Fenway, there are times when the Red Sox college crowd goes overboard with their never-ending thirst for their team’s success and the next beer. But then you can find that in most stadiums except perhaps in G-rated Busch Stadium, where they always applaud the other team if they lose, and in Kauffman Stadium, where there are no fans.

Though I’ve never seen fans actually going at it with fists at Yankee Stadium, I’ve seen some reeealllly heated arguments and some “_____ Suckks” chants that’ll be aimed at like one person wearing some random jersey. I saw once some heated bickering between a Red Sox fan and Yankee fan that lasted the entire game and went on and on after every play but at the end of the game the guys were guys and pounded and said it was all good.
You know what I’d love to see though? An entire group run onto the field one day. I find it hilarious seeing the security run wild trying to catch someone on the field quick before they look like they can’t do their job… and then when they do, it’s TACKLE TO THE GROUND. I wonder what they’d do if a kid ran onto the field. I could imagine them pulling off the old mother trick, pulling them by the ear and saying “You no good piece of __________________________________________________” [That speech always goes on forever.]
V – http://flairforthedramatic.mlblogs.com